ENANTIOSEMY AS A LANGUAGE PHENOMENON (ON THE MATERIAL IN ROMANIAN LANGUAGE)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of enantiosemy in the Romanian language. Enantiosemy is the presence of opposite meanings in one lexical unit. An important reason for the occurrence of enantiosemy is the principle of linguistic economy. It was found that scientists use different terminology to denote words with opposite meanings, in particular: autoantonyms, antagonists, enantionyms, enantiodromes, self-antonyms, Janus words, etc. In Romanian linguistics, the term enantiosemie is more common. It has been established that linguists do not agree on the definition of enantiosemy and consider it as a type of antonymy, homonymy, polysemy, as well as a homoantonym and a marginal phenomenon. In the article, enantiosemy is considered as a lexical-semantic phenomenon, a subspecies of polysemy, in which one polysemantic lexeme has opposite meanings, that is, enantiosemy expresses the semantic ambivalence of the meaning components within one lexeme. Semantic discrepancies occur when polar meanings appear in the semantics of a word, or when a linguistic unit acquires an opposite meaning depending on the type of discourse, artistic work, and author's intentions. It was found that the main features of enantiosemy are polarization and correlation, where opposite values have a common seme. It has been established that enantiosemy does not disappear and does not lose its activity, but becomes a regular phenomenon in the Romanian language, both at the level of speech and at the level of speech, where, as a rule, it is accompanied by ironic intonation. The conducted analysis confirms that the lexical-semantic category of enantiosemy is not uncommon, which allows us to consider it as one of the linguistic universals, which is realized at different levels of language (lexical, phraseological, grammatical), but there are few purely grammatical examples. An analysis of the implementation of the phenomenon of enantiosemy within different parts of the language was carried out, where nouns, verbs, adjectives showed the highest productivity, adverbs, exclamations showed the lowest.